42
Probably in all families—certainly in the doomed clans of Mother Land—there comes a point when no more good news is possible. It is all ill tidings. People get older, they fail, they get fired, they go broke, they stop aspiring, they cheat. Time passing means that things get worse (one of Mother’s notions, which we all came to believe): people fall ill, they weaken, they stink, they die.
So a family crumbles, but in stages, falling like a stand of trees in a forest with its roots in thin soil, like the pitch pines on the Cape rooted in loose sand. The trees don’t go all at once. They fall one by one, from rot, from infestation by bore beetles, from wind, from the undermining of the rising sea, from being too tall or the wrong shape. They snap, they topple, they sometimes knock each other down, and finally they’re all gone. You might discern seedlings, delicate as houseplants, sprouting in the mess of needles and decayed splinters, but it will be decades before they will climb to a stand, and it is a certainty that they will fall too, for even as they rise, they are weakening.
No one gets healthier, no one grows stronger. Our mortality pursues us, our vices overtake us—smoking and drinking and telling lies. Time itself pulls us apart. The family crumbles slowly. It crumbles in installments, but it crumbles.
Hubby was diagnosed with high blood pressure and was put on sick leave. Mother hooted at the irony of a hospital worker, toiling among the healers and pills, becoming ill. “He eats too much,” she said. “He eats the wrong food.” It had to be his own fault.
“One in twenty people who check into a hospital catch a hospital-related illness,” Hubby said. “Hospitals are unhealthy places—everyone knows that.”
“Did you catch high blood pressure?” I asked.
“Very funny,” Hubby said. “Ma says it’s a blessing in disguise. I need to slow down and put my house in order. It’s kind of a wake-up call. I think she’s right.”
As though competing in these illness stakes, and craving attention, Marvin developed a tummy ache he claimed was a bleeding ulcer.
“Stress,” Mother said, cackling at the word—for her one of the new bogus ones—and laughing at the contradiction, for how was it possible to have been stressed in such a simple job as mall cop, circling the benches between Mrs. Fields cookies and Dunkin’ Donuts? Mother reminded us that she was ninety-four years old, was taking no medicine at all, walked up and down her street every afternoon, and was healthy—“No complaints.”
She called me one evening to report that Fred had had a stroke. She sounded certain of the fact, yet somewhat bewildered about the reasons for it. “Apparently, he’d been traveling. China. He got home and was reading the paper. Erma heard him say, ‘I feel funny.’ One whole side of his body was seizing up and he went all feverish. He was rushed to Emergency. They’re doing tests.”
Her story was precise. By the time she called me, she had probably called five or six others, so she sounded practiced. But what did it all mean? You could not be ill without somehow asking for it—sickness in the family indicated a moral fault. What had Fred done to deserve it?
Lately Fred had been a nag, blaming Floyd and me for stirring up trouble by demanding to know which of the children were getting payouts from Mother, and how much, and why.
“Can’t you just let the matter rest?” he’d said in an email, repeating, “Ma can do whatever she wants with her money.”
Really? Here was a woman in her mid-nineties who might very well need the money to pay for round-the-clock nursing or assisted living. She would not be living alone and reading books and making phone calls and going for walks much longer.
“It upsets her to know that her judgment is being questioned,” Fred went on—same email. “She’s frail, she’s forgetful. She gets confused. You should show some compassion.”
I replied saying that someone who was frail and confused at ninety-four should not be handing out checks willy-nilly. There was a contradiction here: either she was feeble and needed guidance, or she was hearty and could do what she wanted. But Fred was no help. This was another example of his lawyer’s ability to hold two opposite views in his head at the same time, and argue them convincingly without believing in either of them.
Now he was in Cape Cod Hospital’s intensive care unit, attached to plastic tubes, one of his hands (so Mother said) “like a dead paw.”
Mother was angry. She could not rationalize the illness of a favored son, her eldest. She blamed his work, his travel, his diet, his wife, his children, his dogs.
“It’s just not fair,” she said to me. I took this to mean that she felt he’d abandoned her: his sickness was a form of disloyalty. Bad things happened to bad people, and also, if he’d really loved Mother, he would not have had the stroke.
Floyd said, “The big explainer! The big moralizer! Look at him now, drooling into his pillow, snatching at the air, crying ‘More light!’ Where is his indirection now? Stroke! I like that. He has been struck down.”
Hubby said, “I heard he’s having trouble swallowing, and they might have to put a grommet in his abdominal wall and do a gastrostomy—hook him up to a feeding tube.”
His tone was horrified satisfaction, gloating at the prospect of the eldest brother kept alive and immobile by a set of pipes feeding him goop. As a nurse, Hubby became important as an interpreter of the science behind the feeding tube.
“I visited Fred today,” Mother said. “He was a wreck.”
She was not moved to pity by the sight of her son lying in intensive care; she felt superior and stronger. She was prepared to release him, for, in a way, he was being sacrificed. He had been Mother’s ally and counselor, and so the stroke was perhaps the result of his effort at being tenaciously loyal. Enduring the stroke was something he’d done for Mother.
“He was lying there,” she said. “He just looked at me with those glassy eyes. He couldn’t speak, but I knew what he wanted to say. ‘Thank you, Mother. Thank you.’ He was letting go.”
We all visited Fred, for the novelty of seeing this once-powerful deputy of Mother’s in his sickbed. We went separately, in the family fashion, and insincerely paid our respects. Fred was rigid, looked broken and beat up. He was wordless apart from a few protesting groans. I listened with satisfaction to the bubbling in his tubes, which resembled the sound of the aerator in a fish tank.
His doctor visited while I was seated, watching. I asked the doctor the obvious question.
“These things are to be expected at his age,” the doctor said.
“He’s only seventy-something,” I said.
“He’s getting on.”
Mother visited Fred often and always returned home revitalized—more phone calls, more baked hermits, more walks up and down the street. His sickness made Mother healthier, boastfully so.
“Hubby explained what an angioplasty is,” she said to me, “but what is a stent? Hubby just confuses me.”
I explained the little I knew of the procedure.
“They did that to Fred yesterday,” she said and, sounding rueful, added, “It seems to be working.”
Eventually, Fred recovered much of his strength, though one arm remained slack. He learned to walk, but he tended to shuffle. He was soon disparaging me again, and ridiculing Hubby for his explanations and for conferring with Mother. He’d had a near-death experience, always revealing, for it is only at such times that you find out what people really think of you. He’d discovered that we were joking about his condition in whispers—no sympathy at all.
“We almost had another saint in the family,” Floyd said.
I told him what the doctor had said about Fred’s age, a little over seventy and susceptible. “He’s getting on.” It was a reminder—we seldom had them—of how old Mother was, and not just old but, it seemed, everlasting.